Page 5 of Happy Is On Hiatus
Sharae had never thought Rita was stupid. Not until she’d married Nate when the ink on her high school diploma was barely dry.
“I don’t think the fool was gloating.” Rita shrugged. “Guess she just figured I should know.”
The sound that came next was a cross between a muted scream and a painful moan as Rita let her head fall back and closed her eyes. Sharae glanced at Jemel, who quickly stood and began pouring caramel-macchiato-flavored creamer into the three gray-and-white patterned mugs.
Sharae was sitting closer to Rita, so she reached out a hand and lightly rubbed her shoulder. Rita shook her head, signaling she didn’t need comfort. Sharae let her hand slip slowly from Rita’s shoulder but didn’t pull back completely.
“It was time,” Rita said evenly. She sat up straighter, rolled her neck, and opened her eyes. “If he doesn’t need the person that made this house a home for him, then I don’t need him or his crap in here anymore.”
Again, it took a Herculean amount of strength for Sharae not to do a fist pump and scream, “Hallelujah!” Jemel scooped sugar out of the canister and put overflowing dollops into each mug.
Rita’s brow furrowed, and she reached out to put a hand over the mug closest to her.
Jemel huffed and put more sugar into her own mug. “So you burned his clothes in the driveway at dawn?”
“I did,” Rita answered and then got up to get the coffeepot. “Now I’m in the mood for an omelet. Y’all want one? I need to refuel before I call my lawyer.”
Sharae and Jemel shared another glance before taking deep breaths and releasing them in a collective shrug.
“You know I do,” Jemel said and held her mug up when Rita returned and began pouring the coffee. “None of that low-fat cheese, though. You see how that shit wasn’t even melting on the burgers last night? Tariq and Ivan were about to revolt in the backyard.”
Rita’s thin lips eased into a smile as she shook her head and grabbed a pot holder from the drawer to set the coffeepot on. “Can’t try to give y’all nothin’ healthy.” She chuckled. “But really, I just grabbed the wrong package. I don’t actually like it, either, but I’m trying to cut back in small ways.”
Jemel sipped her coffee and then waved a hand in front of her face like she hadn’t expected it to be piping hot. Sharae frowned and shook her head. “Aunt Rose got a whole lotta nerve telling somebody they’ve picked up a few pounds.”
“I won’t use the low-fat cheese. I’m gonna need all the caloric assistance I can get to have the conversation I need to have with the lawyer.”
She might also require a criminal lawyer or at the very least her checkbook if the fire chief decided she’d violated any county ordinances by having a bonfire in her driveway. Sharae was fairly certain there wouldn’t be any criminal charges, since she was on her own property and nobody was injured, but there was no doubt the fire could’ve spread, and then there was the Willow Grove Homeowners Association. Rita was the vice president this year, so she’d know better than anybody if she’d violated one of their ridiculous rules, but right now she didn’t seem to be bothered by that.
In fact, Rita didn’t seem overly bothered by any of this, if the burning driveway was subtracted from the equation. Sharae watched carefully while Rita moved around the kitchen doing what was as familiar to her as breathing—cooking for her family. Jemel chattered on about conversations they’d had last night with other family members. The Spades contest that had been issued by their cousin Tariq to anyone who dared challenge him, and the card night that was subsequently scheduled for this Friday. One of the Johnson cousins in Charlotte was pregnant again, and how somebody should replace Uncle Jimmy as the bartender because he was already pissy drunk and about to fall over the table that’d been set up as a makeshift bar.
Sharae joined the conversation, chuckling here and there, adding her comments, but all the while keeping her eye on Rita. In her early years on the force, Sharae had decided which unit she wanted to target. Narcotics had seemed the natural choice considering all the drug activity they’d grown up around, the dealers and users in their families and the consequences that showed up on the nightly news, but for a brief period she’d wondered about going to the bomb squad. The deciding factor had been that Sharae knew she lacked the patience and mastery to watch a ticking time bomb and dismantle it without wanting to pick it up and throw it as far away as possible from the innocent and those she cared about.
That’s how it felt watching Rita. Like she desperately wanted to do something before the explosion affected everything they all knew and loved. And she was helpless to prevent it. She should’ve shoved her gun inside Nate McCall’s mouth years ago, the dirty, no-class piece of shit.
Chapter 3
IT’S NEVER A BAD TIME FOR FOOD.
“So you’re divorcing him,” Jemel said half an hour later when the three of them sat around the island finishing off the breakfast Rita had cooked. “When are you tellin’ the Aunts? I wanna know so I can be there.”
Rita hadn’t thought that far. She’d known there would be obstacles to finally deciding to end her marriage. Just like this hadn’t been Nate’s first time cheating and getting caught, this wasn’t Rita’s first time considering divorce. Itwasthe first time she’d felt there was no other choice.
“How many times I gotta tell y’all I’m grown?” She shook her head after speaking the question and glanced down at her plate. Her appetite hadn’t been disturbed, as she’d eaten the entire western omelet she’d cooked and was now on her second cup of coffee.
Then again, she’d never had any problems eating. It seemed that food—the ease of cooking and enjoying it—was her comfort zone. The kitchen, which she’d personally designed from the large-tiled floors to the wide gray-and-white marble-top island, had served as her happy place even on days when worry and despair crept in to haunt her.
But at Jemel’s question, her mind now circled around the Aunts and their reaction to what she’d decided to do. It was always interestingto see her mother, Violet “Vi” Henderson, with her two sisters, Cecelia “Ceil” Johnson Coleridge and Rosette “Rose” Johnson, go in on other family members—namely Jemel, who the Aunts had all dubbed reckless and irresponsible since she was a teenager. Not that whatever they said mattered to Jemel; she’d long ago stopped being affected by their pile-on judgment and discipline regimen. As for Rita, she wished she’d been so lucky.
“I’ll tell the Aunts when I tell everybody else, I guess,” she continued when neither Sharae nor Jemel had responded to her question.
“And the girls?” Sharae asked. “When are you tellin’ them?”
“No,” Jemel said with a shake of her head. “When are you pullin’ that bitch ass Nate up?”
Rita didn’t miss the warning glare Sharae sent to Jemel seconds before her cousin looked Rita’s way. “What she meant was, did you call Nate? Have you told him this was the last straw?”
They’d never liked Nate. Or rather, they’d been up front with her early on that they’d disagreed with her marrying a man four years older than she was at only nineteen years old. Obviously, she’d disagreed. Age hadn’t mattered because she’d believed she was on the right track—at least the track that her mother had made perfectly clear was meant for her.
